Human Nature has it's good parts

I don't mind if you use this image elsewhere!

Spent most of the day today getting some php scripts to work on my personal site.  While wrestling with the fact that browsers are ****ing anal, I had to do a lot of scrambling to figure out what was going wrong on the server that had worked fine on my local development server.

And of course the answers were all out there.  Not on some big PHP or SVG site, but on forums where other programmers were nice enough to help others deal with the same problem.  That reminded me of something I wrote a long time ago about copyright law and how it goes against the human nature of those in the teaching profession.  It's even in their vernacular, as they say "well, if you don't mind, I'm going to steal these plans from you and use them with my class."

That drives me nuts.  What kind of atmosphere are we in when teachers feel that way about lesson plans that they use in their classrooms?  Teachers are constantly altering lesson plans to adapt them for different students.  They are also constantly creating their own tests, activities, and examples to use with their students.  Too bad the slimeball lawyers have made everyone gun shy about doing what is natural to us: sharing with others.  Enough already.  Amen.  Break.

Of course there are excellent publishers out there that have entered the new millenium, and we need to support them as much as possible.  Also, one of my oldest complaints was about Key Curriculum posting teacher creations in Geometer's Sketchpad on their site and then keeping all copy rights to them.  Well, it appears that has changed and they now have a Sketch Exchange site where teachers can upload their sketches.  The sketches themselves are Creative Commons licensed, and you can download them even in "lurker mode."

Of course, I still use Geogebra instead, as I find it easier to use.  :-)